The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time

Description

Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on the fiction of the United States and considers the place of the genre in world literature. Regionalism is usually understood to be a literature bound to the local, but this study explores how regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood or the province, but also the nation, and ultimately the world. Its key premise is that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It analyzes how concepts crystallize across disciplines and in everyday discourse and proposes ways of revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors' work. It demonstrates, for example, the importance of the figure of the school-teacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color and subsequent place-focused writing. Such representations embody the contested relation in modernity between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning. The volume discusses fiction from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including works by Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Ernest Gaines, Wendell Berry, and Ursula LeGuin as well as romance novels and regional mysteries. Cover The Center of the World: Regional writing and the puzzles of place-time Copyright Dedication PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CONTENTS List of FIGURES 1: From the Ground Up: Thinking about location and literature What Is a Region? Surveying the Literature The Local Local Telling Time Why Genre? 2: Local Knowledge and Book-Learning: Placing the teacher in regional story-telling Beginning: Edward Eggleston, Indiana, and the Nation Turning South: Education and Liberation Richard Malcolm Johnston Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du bois, Constance Fenimore Woolson Education and Conquest: Zitkala-Sa and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin The Topos Persists Jesse Stuart and Frank Mccourt Catherine Marshall and Raymond Kennedy Ernest Gaines Teachers and Learners 3: The Unexpected Jewett Turning to the Author Standing Between Understanding “A Late Supper” Double Vision 4: World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far A (Possibly Surprising) Biographical Sketch Where Is Chinatown? National Language and Literary Education in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” Racialized “Sentimental Education” and Comparative Literature in “Its Wavering Image” National Words and Literary Worlds 5: Regionalisms Now Somewhere in . . . Surveying the Literature, Revisited Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky Ernie Hebert and the Darby Chronicles: Never Back Down Contemporary Fiction and the Global Village In the Place of a Conclusion Endnotes Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Bibliography Book, Films, and Articles Web-Based Sources Index